Canonical's Ubuntu 10.04 is yet another iteration of their Linux distribution,
marketed as being friendly and easy to use. 10.04 is also a "Long Term
Support" version for those who want bug fixes for the next couple of years
without potentially introducing instability from new features.

The Ubuntu desktop is indeed very well polished and thought out, and
as Linux slowly becomes more accepted as a somewhat mainstream product
this is more and more critical. However I did notice a few areas that could
use a bit of improvement.

Ubuntu Linux booting up. On a clean install, the user will only ever
see the splash screen before the desktop. Dual booting with Windows may
involve interaction with the GRUB boot loader. (If you have to ever do
more than just select from its menu, it becomes very unfriendly)

Like most Linux distributions, Ubuntu can be booted from a live CD where
you can install to a hard drive or try it out without installing.

After being installed to a hard drive, this is the default desktop.
The desktop from the Live CD is about the same, although operating programs
using the Live CD can be sluggish due to the slow speeds of CD-ROM drives.
From the hard drive, the desktop and applications seem fairly responsive.

The initial desktop consists of two "Panels" on the screen. One at top
and one at bottom.

The top panel includes three menus that provide user access to the entirety
of the system.

Applications: A list of all user applications installed on the system,
grouped in to sub menus by the application's general use.

Places: A list of common file locations on the system.

System: A list of applets that control preferences and system administration.

The top panel includes a section for icons to commonly used programs. A
user can add additional icons here. By default this includes Firefox and
Help. Although, when I tried it the help system always failed to start!

At the right of the top panel, it also includes:

Network Manager: Indicates the current networking status.

Volume

"Indicator applet": Displays various indicators from chat, mail,
and "social broadcasts" using services such as Flicker, Twitter and Facebook.

Power: Related options such as locking the screen, shutting down and restarting.

Bottom panel:

Show Desktop button: Hides and shows open windows to reveal the desktop.

Open Windows: A selectable list of all application windows that are open.

Workspace Switcher: Switches between several virtual desktops in which
windows may be open. (only open windows are switched, not desktop icons)

Trash: A typical temporary storage location for files before they are permanently
deleted.

Ubuntu seems to recognize all of the hardware in this basic test system,
but initially it only provides a 2-d driver for the video card.

After connecting to the internet, Ubuntu wanted to download and install
"restricted drivers".

With Linux, most drivers are built in to the operating system and can
not be added or updated directly by the end user. An exception has been
made for Nvidia, who wish to keep control over driver distribution and
source code to their video card driver. There are various technical advantages
and disadvantages to this. The program makes a point of warning the user
that bugs in these drivers can not be fixed by Ubuntu developers.

From a users standpoint, built in drivers means you usually will not
be able to make use of newly released hardware until the needed software
is added to your Linux distribution, at which point you usually must upgrade
the entire operating system to the latest version. (In contrast I just
installed a driver for an SATA controller on Windows 95!) On the brighter
side you won't have to hunt down and manually install dozens of separate
drivers.

Once the video drivers were installed, Ubuntu switched to using 3D rendering
for the desktop. A screen shot really can't capture the effects, but windows
animate when minimized or maximized and slide off the screen when a different
desktop is selected. Menus also fade in and out. Most of the default animations
are quick and subtle, but the menu fading makes the menus feel a little
laggy. Window effects can be easily turned off from a control panel.

Over all, not too much has visibly changed in the file management since
my review of 7.04.

Ubuntu 10.04 starts off with an empty desktop, but you can add files
and folder directly on the desktop.

Removable drives and network shares in use appear both on the desktop
and in the "Places" menu in the top panel. All drives, including local
drives can be viewed from the "Computer" item in the menu.

File windows can be displayed as Icons, List (details), or Compact (smaller
list of icons) Icons can also be made larger or smaller using the zoom
buttons. An "Extra" pane can be displayed in a window for source/destination
browsing. The side pane listing places is optional. Toolbar, location bar,
and status bar are also optional. The file browser can also display multiple
folders in the same window using tabs.

The file browser breaks the current location down in to a series of
clickable buttons. Normally this works great, but sometimes I needed to
type in a location manually. I kept having to search for the option to
let me do that, which is located under the "Go" menu. In a previous version
there used to be a button next to the location for that.

Annoyingly, the print screen button fails to operate when a menu is
displayed. To get a screen shot of menus I had to run the screen shot application
directly.

Accessing floppy drives works, although it fails to check to see if
the disk has been changed. If you remove or put in a different disk you
must select "unmount" or it will keep thinking the original disk is there.
Yea, yea, traditional floppy drives don't have any reliable way to notify
the OS if a disk is changed or removed. Cry me a river. At least it beats
how things were in the 1990s when a Linux user would have to type a truckload
of archaic commands after inserting or removing a disk. They didn't care
about floppy drives then, they certainly don't care about them now that
almost nobody uses them any more.

Browsing networks gives me an error, but it works anyway.

Pannels can be added and customized. Creating a new panel seems problimatic
as somtimes it creates a pannel that starts off invisible.

It seems way too easy to delete the important panels. It looks like
it is supposed to prevent you from deleting the very last panel on the
screen so you have some way to create a new panel (create new panel is
not a desktop option), but if the last panel is invisible then what? Try
that from a live CD where it dosn't matter: create a new panel that comes
out invisible and then delete the two on the screen.